Climbing Toward Love

Today, incredibly, my wife Naomi and I have been married for thirty years. This is a number that fits awkwardly with my subjective experience of myself and our relationship. In my mind, we are still love-struck twenty-somethings with our whole future in front of us. The odometer, weirdly, tells a different tale.

Thirty years ago, two mostly clueless kids—and gosh, we were literally just kids!—stood up in front of a whole bunch of people and said “I do” in response to a whole bunch of statements. We promised to love each other whether we were sick or healthy, rich or poor, for better or worse as long as we both shall live. We made these promises, obviously, having no idea what they might demand of us in the future. We said “yes” to each other not having any real idea what that “yes” would entail. We just knew that we wanted to walk the road ahead together.

And I’m glad that we did, that we have, that we will. My wife is one of God’s very best gifts to me. Her “yeses” mean more than any others. We are very different people, in many ways, but this is nothing to be lamented. Our “yeses,” at their best, shape us into better, truer, deeper versions of ourselves.

A while back I came across a quote over at The Marginalian. It’s perhaps a bit heady for an anniversary post (Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt probably wouldn’t find their way into many Hallmark cards) but hey, it’s my blog and my our anniversary—I can quote who I want.

“What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?” Mary McCarthy asked her friend Hannah Arendt in their correspondence about love. The question resonates because it speaks to a central necessity of love — at its truest and most potent, love invariably does change us, deconditioning our painful pathologies and elevating us toward our highest human potential. It allows us, as Barack Obama so eloquently wrote in his reflections on what his mother taught him about love, “to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, [be] finally transformed into something firmer.”

But in the romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme as to render love fragile. When lovers are expected to fuse together so closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralyzing codependence — a calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth. In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists with an integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in his love letters to Hannah Arendt: “Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.”

I love this because I think it’s true. We become what we love and yet remain ourselves. I am not the same person after thirty years spent saying “yes” to Naomi. Our marriage has changed me and it’s changed her. It’s supposed to. This isn’t to say that we have each become more like the other, necessarily. It’s not even to say that we always and only change one another for the better (would that this were so!). It is simply to say that our love has marked us. We do not cease to be who we are as individuals. We’re just different for having loved each other.

Two more quotes about love and marriage that I can’t resist posting on my our anniversary. The first, also from The Marginalian, has me thinking back to when we met as teenagers and what it feels like to look back now:

Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.

Love is a construction, something we build. It’s not something that happens to us that we passively wait for, no matter what the crappy Christmas romcoms we watch over the next month might suggest. It’s a tenacious adventure (what a lovely description).

The final one is from U2 frontman Bono. This is from his autobiography Surrender where he reflects on his own wedding day and the tenacious adventure that has followed:

 

We were the playwrights and the play, the actors and the critics. Excited and nervous to begin our adventure together. No idea where we’d be in ten years. Twenty. Thirty. I raise you again. Forty years.

We’ll eventually figure out what was going on in that moment. Rather than falling in love, we were climbing up toward it. We still are.

Beautiful.

Naomi, thank you for your many “yeses,” for this construction we are building, this tenacious adventure, this love that we have fallen into and are climbing toward.

Feature image source.